This is Dexter Nextnumber's User page. There is some personal content in this user page to bring you up to speed as to which subjects he is likely to touch on, and what he may end up contributing material to. If you embark upon a personal vendetta, resorting even to the mailing of snail-mail letters to him, as though they were authored by him, as if he would use his own name to mail them to himself, or if you attempt to appropriate electronically his credit and abuse it, or do even worse, under the impression you are anonymous, rest assured you are not.
He is a male.
He is 51 years old.
He wore a beard and mustache until September 27, 1998, shaved off his beard but retained his mustache until April 1, 2004, when he shaved his face completely, becoming completely beardless, and by choice remaining beardless to this day.
He wears different kinds of wireframe glasses depending on whether he is reading, walking around, or driving.
His father had brown eyes.
Dexter Nextnumber's mother had and still has blue-grey eyes, while Dexter has hazel-green eyes. His brothers all have brown eyes. See the article on eye color to understand this more. Nobody in his family is colorblind; all of them can see all of the colors in the spectrum. However, human beings are a remarkably varied lot, and Dexter would not be surprised that, perhaps, somewhere someone in the world can discern even more colors than he can.
Dexter Nextnumber's father had dark hair, but it went white by age 70. His father's half-brother had dark hair, but it went grey by age 65.
Dexter Nextnumber's mother had dark hair, his mother's older sister had auburn hair; his mother's younger sister had dark hair, and her little brother had dark hair. They are all grey now. Dexter Nextnumber's mother's father is reputed to have had red hair, but this was before color photographs were widespread. An unusual genetic trait possessed by his grandmother, is that she had never had a haircut, or even trimmed it, and yet she never managed to grow her hair down to her shoulders. It just never grew down that far. Another unusual trait, is that Dexter's grandmother is still alive, over 102 years old. She enjoys a great longevity.
In other words, or perhaps to sum up, he and his brothers and his mother and father all have or had dark hair, this being a color that is between brown and black. However, his younger brother's hair is the lightest shade amongst them. Neither he nor any of his brothers are going bald, but because they were all born in the 1950s, they are getting pretty grey. Even still, Dexter Nextnumber has pretty thick hair. See the articles on hair and hair color to understand this more.
His lineage goes back several hundred years, variously, to Wales, Oslo, and Le Puy. Dexter Nextnumber has unusual genetics, and has very wide feet. He was cursed with a pair of supernumerary wisdom teeth (so that he had six wisdom teeth in all), which in his 27th year an oral surgeon removed in one lengthy afternoon, requiring him to convalesce in bed for over a week, and his gums didn't fill in the sockets for seven or eight months after that. Somewhat more curiously, and somewhat less than tangentially relevant, his aunt was born with three kidneys. Although his mother had her tonsils taken out, he has never had his out, nor his appendix, and for all that, furthermore, or anyway, he generally enjoys good health.
Dexter Nextnumber has never checked into a hospital. He does not believe that people should have to go to the hospital if they don't want to. It is probably healthier for people to quarantine themselves for as long as it takes to get well, than go to a hospital. If people fall ill from exposure to contagia (i.e., contagious diseases), they should make this fact known by putting a sign on their front door.
He does not smoke or use drugs. He does not drink alcoholic beverages, tea, or coffee. (This is mostly because he doesn't want to get a stomach ache, or a headache, or worse, and he knows that empty calories are not healthy to consume; being a sensible person, he sometimes breaks his self-imposed rule on beverages, tea, and coffee, but not very often.) It was in the mid-1990s through the 2000s that he drank a regular caffe latte or mocha latte but in 2004 or 2005 he decided to save some money and quit doing that, and he now avoids tea and coffee altogether. Be that as it may, his occasional indulgence is confined now mostly to a few hot chocolates every week, or a jar of light green tea when he goes to the movies.
He is not a party animal. Moreover, he does not feel comfortable with party animals. In fact, party animals sort of scare him. Some people think he is a boring, straight-laced 'square' and that probably isn't too far from the truth.
He does not have a bicycle.
He does not know how to ride a motorcycle. When he was a kid, he was scared of motorcycle gangs.
He is unwilling to learn how to hang glide or sky dive. He has never been on an airplane, jet, or helicopter. He has only been on a roller coaster once, and that was around 1970 when he and his parents and his brothers went to Disneyland.
He has never climbed a snow-covered mountain peak. The closest he came to doing that was when he walked for 30 minutes on Ptarmigan Glacier on the south side of Mt. St. Helens. (The eruption and mud flow was on the north face - the other side of the mountain.) It got so cold that he had to turn back. And that was in the height of the summer in August. His feet were icing over, even while the air was 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
He has better things to do with his time than going to the beach and learning how to surf, snorkel, or scuba dive.
He has a car, and wishes that gas didn't cost so much.
He often walks to or from points on a mass transit line, provided the weather is fair, and the distance is less than 7 miles. If the overall cumulative elevation change is more than 300 feet, those 7 miles become a little more difficult. Sometimes he drives halfway through the city he lives in, and matches that distance in miles of walking. He walks just as much for health, as to save money.
He does not like riding elevators or escalators when taking the stairs is so much better for a person. He thinks that running up and down stairs is more fun than running on a racetrack. He does not like being trapped in an elevator and having to breathe other people's air.
He has never seen an armadillo in the wild, and looks forward someday to seeing one.
He actually saw a colony of bees migrate once. Their scouts travel first, and the entire hive follows second, usually about 5 to 10 minutes later. The hive traveled directly north, up from the south. At first it looked like a dark cloud, and as it passed over him, the sky darkened, almost like it was night. (It was about 2 pm, and the weather was sunny and blue, probably August.) No, he is not allergic to bees. They didn't attack him, they just went right over him. A truly amazing sight to see.
He likes cats, even if he is allergic to them. He pets his cat every day. On this account, he sometimes has a mild sneezing attack, or allergy-induced asthma. Once, when he was hiking through a neighborhood in Southeast Portland, he came across a curly-haired cat. The gene for curly hair in felines is supposed to have originated in The Dalles around 1990. Because it is dominant, it has spread around the world in remarkably short time. On March 20, 2010, his grey cat gave birth to a litter of four kittens. What made this strange, is that three of them were of varying degrees of grey. The fourth was a perfectly white albino female kitten with pink eyes (viewed from one perspective) or light blue eyes (viewed from another perspective). This litter lacks the gene for meowing. About 10 days later, the grey mother's sister gave birth to a litter of two kittens. These have tiger-like stripes, and know how to meow.
He thinks dogs are too noisy. And he's allergic to them, too. Or, more accurately, he is allergic to a specific protein present in the animal's saliva, which is deposited on their fur when they groom themselves.
He saw a pair of hummingbirds engage in a courtship dance once. Even eagles have courtship dances. It is a unique way of flying in circles and spirals, often with bobbing of their heads, and irregular flapping of their wings. If they were interested simply in flying, they wouldn't have flown so crazy.
He once saw a tribe of little animals on a foothill to the Cascade mountain range. These little creatures are half as tall as Hobbits, live in rockpiles, and are probably variants of marmots. They stand upright, and can walk (as they are to some degree bipedal (like prairie dogs)), and have opposable thumbs. If you camp there, they can get into your knapsacks and steal your cookies. Smart little critters. Do 'em a favor, and give them some food when you see them. Who knows, they might even have a big brother species mistaken for the saskwatch. They have a cry that sounds a lot like "meep!"
Parrots are territorial animals capable of intense pair-bonding with humans when their own kind are not available to them. They are so territorial that if you barge in on them unexpectedly, they will start screaming and shrieking, and it is safer if you depart from them promptly, especially if their owner/master is nowhere around. They are a lot like burglar alarms or watchdogs, with piercingly loud cries.
He saw a peacock attack its own reflection. Those things need to be protected from themselves.
The last time he saw a porcupine in the wild, was 40 years ago on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.
The common possum really likes the smell of fresh bread. If given his preferences, he will go for a loaf of fresh bread instead of meat or cat food. His long snout lets him sniff out the location of bread, even if it is wrapped up in a plastic bag. Yes, the female of the species likes to hide in burrows and make clicking sounds when calling for a mate.
He saw a sparrow attack an eagle once and win. They do this by hurling themselves at one of the eagle's wings in midflight. By disturbing the eagle in this way, the larger bird can be made to flounder, falter, and fall out of the sky.
He wishes the genes of the woolly mammoth could be introduced to the modern elephant but if the world is undergoing global warming, that's probably not a good idea. Be that as it may, he feels mammoths are really cool.
He does not understand why the genes for zebras are not crossed with more horses. Sure, it's difficult, and many of the hybrids are infertile, but modern science should let us find a way to create race horses that look like zebras.
He is currently struggling with Hebrew and needs all the help he can get.
He studied Classical Greek at the university for 2 years. A lot of it went in one ear, and out the other.
He studied Classical Latin for 2 years in high school, 7 years at the university, and a couple years on his own; this was once his specialty, and he's still pretty good at it.
He took a couple years of Italian, and remembers almost nothing of it.
He studied German for 4 or 5 years at the university, but it has been a long, long time since he has taken a refresher course.
He can suffer his way through Old English but let's face it, your typical PC/Mac keyboard lacks keys for thorn and edh so it's a real ordeal composing passages in this language.
He finds the Nawatl language intriguing.
He finds Volapuk to be an interesting artificial language.
He is comfortable with 6502 and 68000 assembly language programming. He believes that the closer you can get to the metal, the better. In fact, good programmers ought to be familiar with machine code no matter what microprocessor they are working with. He thinks that clean room design is a challenging concept because it requires an engineer to have, on the one hand, an exceptional programming ability, talent, or 'knack,' and, on the other hand, extreme inexperience with the platform being scrutinized. For this reason, Dexter Nextnumber refuses to learn how modern GUI-based computer systems "do their thing" - it is enough to see that one or more 'mouses' need to be clicked (in or out of sequence) before something happens. A similar argument can be raised against learning how an unfamiliar text environment acts in response to keyboard input: a very good programmer charged with the duty of authoring or designing a competitive platform can withstand charges of copyright infringement if he has never seen the source code behind a particular operating system.
He is not a '"C" programmer. Good programmers know what kind of bytes are being executed, where they are, and where they came from, and what they do; good programmers are capable of reaching executable opcodes and altering them, one way or another.
He does not approve of Unicodes or HTML although he admits they are currently useful, if only because they are all over the place, clogging up bandwidth. Their usefulness vanishes in an environment where they are absent, however, such as private, non-internet data streams (some involving Gateways) where meticulous care is observed in keeping those blasted things out. Hewlett-Packard Laser Jet Escape Sequences are a lot more useful than HTML codes, however much HTML is touted as the "in thing" to be aware of.
He had a highly expanded C-128 single-user computer, and has fond memories of PETSCII and prefers pronouncing it with all three syllables: PETASCII. He finds single-user computers to be more useful than modern contraptions designed for multi-user environments. Multi-user environments are just plain difficult to program for. He is familiar with the sixteen color codes of PETASCII, and what it means to be in Commodore quote mode. He still feels good symbolic assemblers should be able to support string arguments in Commodore quote mode, something that is pretty much hard (if not impossible) to find nowadays. (Go to Dexter Nextnumber's talk page to see a .GIF on the CBM Kernal.)
He felt the CBM Kernal was an interesting thing for beginning programmers to study.
He considers a shift lock key far better to have than a caps lock key. He wishes his keyboard didn't have a caps lock key. It only gets in the way. What madman dreamed that awful thing up, anyway? The caps lock key serves no rational purpose other than to make it that much harder to type a long sentence, let alone a paragraph or book.
He prefers white letters on a black screen. And second to that, cyn-colored letters on a screen of deep blackish blue. If the wordprocessor can't, won't, or doesn't support colored text, there's something seriously wrong with it! Or maybe it's just the hardware platform being saddled with the wrong operating system.
He has heard of make and break codes for scanning the keyboard, but still thinks that it is a lot easier (and sometimes more elegant) to do it by raising a line high, and seeing if someone pulled it low (as by depressing it and forming a closed circuit), and then detecting it by looking for a ground, the way people did in the 1980s.
He thinks that the upside down exclamation mark found in the Spanish alphabet should have its own key on the keyboard, and its ASCII value should be $A1; similarly, the upside down question mark should be on the same key as the regular question mark, but use a different modifier key than the SHIFT key, and the ASCII value returned should be $BF. He thinks that the left curvy double quote should have its own key on the upper left side of the keyboard, and its ASCII value should be $A2, the right curvy double quote should be $A3, again with a key of its own, on the other side of the keyboard. Yes, these values represent significant departures from PETASCII as a standard, but it's one he could live with. The delete + backspace key should be hexadecimal $14 while the insert key should be $94. For a delete "without backspace," that should be $15.
He thinks the letters "WP" ought to stand for WordPerfect. Although he has tried WP for the Atari ST, he has come to the conclusion that WP 5.1 for DOS is probably the best manifestation of that Word Processor. Most of his documents from 1988 through 2008 are written in Word Perfect format.
He thinks that SpeedScript was an interesting word processor. Nevertheless, he liked WP 5.1 for DOS somewhat more because of its 80 column display, and preview screen.
He enjoys science fiction when he has plenty of time to waste reading it.
Here is a list of some of the books he has recently read, or tried to read and gave up, or read in part and plans to read to completion. At least 9 out of 10 have been read all the way through. It is not the same thing as a book collection. (Many of these books he just gives away, rather than keeps; that said, there are some books he would never throw out, starting with Abbott's New Card Games (1963) by Robert Abbott, the inventor of Baroque chess. ) However, in the list below, most of the books are science fiction but some of them are not. This list is not sorted by title or genre but by author, and even then a significant liberty has been taken with some of their spellings, as the subject matter may compel something to be taken out of order. (Please don't re-alphabetize them, or attempt to sort them.)
If you would like to help me, please consider logging in so you can help write articles for the red references below. Even stubs are better than nothing at all.
He has recently read:
These aren't exactly science fiction, but deal more with dystopias, governments, and societies gone wrong.
He dabbles in repetitive mathematical patterns confined to regular and irregular grids and lattices, including transformative logarithmic grids. If you know of an unusual grid that produces an interesting pattern, you might wish to mention it in the discussion page associated with this account. The five-cornered rectangular grid for Nine Men's Morris is an example of a dislocated grid that was stretched by adding an extra corner.
His List of Top 12 Films have currently the following entries:
Not all films are worth having, but many are worth seeing. Having already seen Sole Survivor (1970 film) on TV, he wishes he had it on DVD. On the other hand, some films are so entertaining, they are worth having on DVD. For that reason, he wishes he had Modern Girls on DVD, this movie being a vehicle for the beautiful actress Daphne Zuniga. And then there is the occasional movie with a clever artistic twist (like the huge tilted space ship bubbling away in the shallow waters off of Sicily, in 20 Million Miles to Earth, or some novel rendition of an old classical song, that makes it interesting. For instance, Bermuda Depths (with the striking tune of "Jenny's Theme") or She with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
He does not consider his moviegoing to be a form of recreation, but a serious investment of time for a money-making, business related purpose.
When it comes to filmmaking, a number of employees of the state of Oregon, and of the United States, associate themselves with him every step of the way. They understand the gravity of this matter, and are going to continue to offer him assistance in this matter.
Pursuant to this matter, Dexter Nextnumber has obtained some experience holding a boom, and lighting a set with PAR lights.
When he was a teenager, more or less, he played Backgammon, Baroque, Chess, Conquest, Diplomacy, Dominoes, Gin Rummy, Hearts, Mille Bornes, Risk, Spades, Sprouts, Stratego, and Uno. His experience in wargames is pretty much limited to SPI's 1971 game, Napoleon at Waterloo which inspired him to design a similar game with a few extra pieces on a slightly larger, rectangular grid (necessitating complex moving and stacking rules), but the French Army tended to lose because it had a much harder time with the sneak attack on the little farmhouse and orchard in the center of the battlefield. He felt SPI's Wolfpack was really boring, and kept rooting for a return to simple, if not simpler, Napoleonic games. When SPI's East is Red came out, he felt that a much better game would have been MacArthur Rules (where the US embarks on an all out war in the 1950s with a first strike on North Korea and Red China) using a similar game map, and game rules.
Around 1979 or 1980, he played West End Games' Junta a few times. And, for more conventional games, a variant of Nine Men's Morris on a 5-cornered rectangular lattice (it was a dislocated rectangular grid). His experiments with dislocated rectangular grids extended from Nine Men's Morris to offbeat variants of Chess and Go. Fascinated with the number 5, he also played variations of backgammon with smaller "tables" but was dissatisfied with the playability of those variants. During the late 1970s, he also dwelt on the playability of playing cards with five suits with thirteen (or fourteen) cards each, namely, Ace (high), King, Queen, (and a Knight sometimes), Jack, Ten, etc. The high price of printing up cards of that nature mitigates against them ever becoming as prevalent as the traditional suits.
When he was in college, he played The Awful Green Things From Outer Space a few times. It deserves a special mention even though he never got good at it. He just couldn't bear to kill the little green things, no matter how awful they were.
He is currently thinking of getting a copy of Ticket to Ride (board game) for a lady friend. It's a game about railroads and itineraries, and she probably would like that a lot. However, he has not ridden a train (i.e., passenger car drawn by a locomotive) since he went to the World's Fair in Seattle in 1962.
He can't imagine anything more boring than having to sit on some bleachers and watch sports. Just about as boring, would be staying home and watching sports on television, whether it's Football, Soccer, Rugby, Baseball, Basketball, or Volleyball. The same thing applies to car races, dog races, horse races, motorcycle racing, skiing, tennis, wrestling, boxing, swimming, and hockey. Similarly with sports involving toboggans.
He is not a fan of the Olympics, or any kind of Olympics. There must be something else to do with your time.
Even watching Bowling Tournaments, Bridge Tournaments, Ping Pong tournaments, Poker tournaments, and Polo tournaments counts as the same thing - watching sports on TV - and he could pass on any or all of those activities without batting an eye.
That said, anyone being familiar with feats of great endurance and daring, such as having participated in the Iditarod, or being involved in the support crew for that sort of thing, is someone he would regard as a hero or near hero, even if he wouldn't want to do something like that himself. He also has the greatest respect for those involved in search and rescue operations.
He is not sure if orienteering is a sport or a pastime, but that is something he could get into, given the motivation and opportunity. He actually has a couple of funny stories relating to his attempts to go and attend a couple of orienteering contests. But each time, he was either a week late, or several hours late, mostly because he had gotten himself lost getting there in his car. Just try going to one of those events, and discovering everybody has already gone home!
He has strong religious views that are admittedly unconventional.
On Sunday nights at 9 PM, Dexter Nextnumber occasionally listens to Little Steven's Underground Garage. Unfortunately, he is torn between the desire to listen to this program, and watch Masterpiece Theater (see below). He cannot do both at the same time.
Dexter Nextnumber occasionally watches the following programs, in whole or in part:
He generally changes the channel when a sports program comes on.
Sometimes, but not always, he stays up to watch Saturday Night Live. He considers Kesha's recent performance on SNL to be particularly noteworthy.
He has fond memories of Sliders, and never had the free time to watch it as much as he wanted to. And now it's off the air.
Dexter Nextnumber currently subscribes to the snailmail version of the National Law Journal.
In the recent past, he has subscribed to Verbatim (magazine), The Oregonian, and the Statesman Journal.
In the mid 1990s, he subscribed to the "Advance Sheets of the Oregon courts" - a collection of opinions published by the Oregon Judiciary. He did not throw them away, and still has them. He has also subscribed to the Oregon State Bar Bulletin.
In the early to mid 1970s, he subscribed to The National Review and Current Events magazine.
Among many other luminaries of stage and screen, as well as luminaries in their own right, he admires in particular, Daphne Zuniga, Nadya Suleman, Ali McGraw, Susan St. James, Stephanie Zimbalist, and Fran Drescher. Also worth watching, are actresses who once were quite famous for no or little reason, but who have become accomplished actresses in their own right, such as modern performers Susan Dey, Molly Ringwald, and Justine Bateman.